COINs change leaders - Lessons Learned from a Distributed Course

TL;DR

This study analyzes how communication patterns within distributed student teams in a COINs course predict team creativity, highlighting oscillating leadership and communication variability as key factors.

Contribution

It introduces an automated method to predict team creativity based on communication network analysis in a distributed educational setting.

Findings

Oscillating leadership predicts higher creativity

Communication variability correlates with creativity

Quick responses and positive language enhance creativity

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the communication network of 50 students from five universities in three countries participating in a joint course on Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). Students formed ten teams. Interaction variables calculated from the e-mail archive of individual team members predict the level of creativity of the team. Oscillating leadership, where members switch between central and peripheral roles is the best predictor of creativity, it is complemented by the variance in the amount of sending or receiving information, and by answering quickly, and positive language. We verify our automatically generated creativity metrics with interviews.